Haiti:
I was in Haiti for a week with Iris Ministries. Probably the biggest thing I saw and experienced on this trip was the real, radical love of God. Whether someone got healed, or had an encounter with the Lord, or played a game of soccer with them...I saw it done out of true love. While filming everything you definitely notice a lot more than you normally would. I would watch people watching us, wondering what they were thinking. Instead of seeing them as a mission or a documentary, God was showing me them as a people. and how beautiful they are. When traveling around Haiti you first start to notice the destruction and trash and poverty and brokenness, but when you start to look beyond all that you will find a very beautiful place, and a people with such depth and beauty to them. God was beginning to show me His heart for them and through us was wanting to show the Haiti people His heart for them. And that's what I began trying to capture on camera and that's what I want to show people through the footage I took.
Quick testimony:
We were waiting at the airport to pick up some lost luggage. A man in his 40's came up to the truck motion to his ears and for someone to pray for him (he just came up "randomly"). He couldn't speak and couldn't talk since he was 7 because a he said he was cursed by a voodoo priest. A couple people started praying for him and after about 5-10 minutes he starts freaking out because he can hear the crazy horns and trucks passing right behind him in his left ear. They keep going and before we had to go he seemed to be able to hear and was learning to speak again. They got to pray over him and bless him and tell/show him how much God loves him.
Costa Rica:
This was definitely a dream trip for sure. Something I began dreaming about last year and as we went I began to see how this trip has been on God's heart since the beginning of time. We filmed the whole trip so I won't go into great detail but parts that stick out were...
Over a three day span we saw a church in the capital of San Jose come alive, hungering for the "more" of God. The first night someone felt God wanted to heal someone's knee. This boy raised his hand; he hadn't been to church for a long time but something told him he needed to be there that night. His knee got healed and he went home and told all his family. The next service his cousin (I think) came with these braces on his legs (kinda like in Forest Gump).
He had gotten brain damage when he was 2 (he's now 7 I think) and wasn't able to walk on his without braces, he would just fall down and it would be really painful.
By the end of the night he had his braces off and was running and jumping around the back of the church,
his mom was in tears and they went home and got more of their family to come...it just kept going.
Our translator invited us to his work to pray for his boss (a Senator of Costa Rica). So we got to go to this government building and pray over a senator and release the Lord's goodness over that place. There was a really important bill being voted on about abortion and the like...we were told that ten minutes before we came one very influential man said he wouldn't sign against it. We found out later that right about when we were coming in he changed his mind...pretty crazy.
Then Lance felt he was supposed to prophesy over our translator about being the future President of Costa Rica...heavy I know. Supposedly, he's had that happen about 3 or 4 other times...once by this well known prophet, Cindy Jacobs. Anyway, it's just so crazy because here we are on a mission/surf trip just going with the flow, not totally sure what we're going to do too far in advance and we end up in the Costa Rican Government.
Probably my favorite night was when we finally made it to the coast and went to a Christian Surfers meeting. A couple from my class last year, John and Shirley Vaughaun, had been there for a couple weeks and the guys there had started to ask a lot of questions about healing and prophecy and Bethel. So we went and I just got to share my whole process of beginning to hunger for more and my curiosity about healing that lead me to go to Bethel and see for myself. We got to prophesy God's goodness to each one of them and were able to pray for healing and a lot of them got touched and healed and it was just so good because as surfers we just had that immediate connection and it didn't feel forced, it just felt like family you know. This was so huge for me, I mean if you knew me well at all last year, you probably remember it being a dream of mine to see what God's doing at Bethel and around the world through healing and power and love start to break into the surf world. One man, Jamie, had an arthritic hip that hurt constantly...after a few times of praying he couldn't feel the pain anymore...we saw him a couple days later and he said it still felt good. I love those people and can't wait to go back surf with them more and just share life together again.
Lance and the team left for home on the 13th and Ben and I stayed a couple more days before making our 8 hour bus ride to San Jose to stay in a super sketchy part of town, where our cabbie wouldn't let us walk a block. His reason was signaling to us that our throats would get slit...hahahaha! So we got a hotel for 5 hours then got on another bus at 3am and took a 17 hour bus up through Nicaragua and into Honduras where we currently are right now. Again we found some sketchy hotel in some sketchy area of the capital Tegucigalpa. We just ate breakfast and are about to go meet Ryan Harris and his team at the airport. We'll be with them and Georgian and Winnie Bannov for the next 9 or so days here and then in Nicaragua, ministering in the trash dumps and orphanages...just loving people. Then we'll have a few days to figure out something to do before flying back home out of Costa Rica.
Love you all...gotta run...thanks for listening and supporting the dream!
-Josh Colegrove
